Graham 'Northy' North recently joined the oOple team to cover some events in the North East, along with some other exciting project in the near future all being well. Northy is a TTech Racing sponsored driver and all round nutter - so thanks to G for his great help.

A bit of a shorter report this time, sorry, but it is a busy time of the year at the moment and I still have cars to get ready for the National this weekend (Bury Metro).

On Sunday the 3rd of June NERCR (formally Durham City Model Car Club) held round two of the North East 4wd regional series. The venue is a piece of essentially flat grass out side the Nissan Sports and Social club in the grounds of the Nissan Factory itself.
For most competitors it is a good trek up the A19 and so the strong turn out of 65 drivers in the 4wd class that tends not to be as well supported as the 2wd class was great.
The North East region is very competitive with a good number of F1 and F2 drivers, but it was good to see some new faces again.

With part of the A19 closed due to an accident resulting I a rather long detour, booking in and practice were extended a little to allow people to get there and get sorted out.

The weather was great from the start, nice, sunny and hot! The track was a little different to the usual track that the club lay out, being a little smaller than usual and certainly a lot tighter. It had been laid out on a well used football pitch, and so the quality of grass varied from verging on long and lush to almost non existent and dead in other places! This coupled with the dry weather made parts of the track quite slippery and dusty from the start which all adds to the challenge!

The usual steep man made wooden table top had been turned into 2 large steep jumps. I’m not totally convinced that this was the best idea in the world as there was no real skill involved in just slapping down onto the flat ground.

Round by round qualifying was chosen in case of poor weather and to allow for the track to wear. In the end the weather was kind to us all day, but the track did gradually get lower and lower grip.

Qualifying. After qualifying the top ten looked like this: 1          Richard Lowe 2          Tom Cockeril 3          Ben Riley 4          Craig Collinson 5          Graham North 6          Lee Farrer 7          Adam Skelding 8          James Dixon 9          David Snee 10         Richard Isherwood The A final result: 1          Richard Lowe 2          Tom Cockeril 3          Craig Collinson 4          Graham North 5          Richard Isherwood 6          Adam Skelding 7          Lee Farrer 8          James Dixon 9          David Snee 10         Ben Riley

A great meeting for Stephen Adams, top F4 and 3rd in the B final to move him up a good few championship positions.